Being Courageously Vulnerable

Years ago, I ran over a cat with my car. It wasn’t on purpose. I was driving home late one night and heard a thud. I pulled over to see what had happened. A black and gray cat was lying motionless on the street. I felt so guilty.

I didn’t want it to get hit by another car, so I decided to move it out of the middle of the street. As I approached it, it started to move around. It tried to stand up, but its hind legs weren’t cooperating. I was so happy it was alive, but so sad it was injured.

As I got close enough to help, it turned to me and hissed! I jumped back in fear. Then I yelled at it, “I’m trying to help you!” It started to drag itself away from me while continuing to hiss.

That cat did what all of God’s creatures are designed to do when vulnerable—self-protect.

It’s a survival technique to avoid further harm. When we feel weak, insecure, lonely, scared, and defenseless, our instinct is to attack, run, or play dead. This self-protection response isn’t just instinctual, it’s also learned. Before we’re even able to articulate our thoughts and feelings, we learn how to make self-protecting decisions when we feel unsafe.

After our daughter Elia was born, my wife, Marie, suffered a terrible season of postpartum depression. For the first couple of years of my daughter’s life, Marie was not available to her emotionally, and sometimes physically. By the age of three, Elia struggled with closeness with others. She had huge emotional outbursts and didn’t want to be held or hugged by anyone. When people wanted to be close to her, she’d act out by withdrawing.

Our family got professional help, and Marie and Elia are both in great places emotionally and relationally these days. Elia doesn’t remember that difficult stage of her life, but Marie and I call that time the “the feral years.” The word feral refers to a domesticated animal that has learned to survive on its own. Without care, nurture, training, and love, animals resort to radical self-protection.

We do that too.

The opposite of radical self-protection is courageous vulnerability. Instead of attacking, running, or playing dead when we feel weak, insecure, lonely, scared, and defenseless, we can reach out for help. We can be aware of our thoughts and feelings, learn to articulate them, and ask for what we need. We can also develop the emotional resilience to handle life when we don’t get what we ask for. That’s what it means to be vulnerable and courageous.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is pushing through fear. Our survival instinct will tell us, “Protect what you have, and don’t ask for what you need.” But courage says, “It may be scary, but be honest and risk going after what you need.”

Courageous vulnerability is about pushing past the unhealthy fears that are keeping us from being known and loved by others.

Some of us are not courageously vulnerable because we have reached out for help in the past and it wasn’t there. Anxiety keeps us feral. Here’s what that could look like:

1. When we’re feeling anxious, we hiss at others who want to help.

We may have learned that when we’re vulnerable, we get hurt. This has made us overprotective of ourselves. Being courageously vulnerable means reaching out to others for help. It may take time to find the right helpful relationships, but each attempt is worth it. We can say, “I’m going to try again.”

2. When we’re feeling anxious, we avoid what scares us.

We think we are protecting ourselves by isolating, but we need to share our fears with others. Facing uncertainty is what we have in common with all human beings. Being courageously vulnerable means sharing our struggles with uncertainty with people. We can say, “There are others like me.”

3. When we’re feeling anxious, we feel shame.

We’re embarrassed by our worry, fear, and intrusive thoughts or feelings. Rather than fixing or following our fears, we can un-shame our worry by opening up to those we trust. Courageous vulnerability can help us express our insecurities. We can say, “I’m feeling kind of tender right now.”

Jesus prayed on the night before he was crucified. Knowing he would be arrested and die; he went to an isolated area and asked his closest friends to come with him. After agonizing in prayer, he found that his friends had fallen asleep! He said, “Couldn’t you watch with me even one hour?” (Matt. 26:40). He was disappointed and expressed it. If Jesus reached out to others at His most vulnerable times, maybe we can too!

Vulnerability is about being exposed to the possibility of being hurt or disappointed. We should not be vulnerable with people we know will intentionally victimize us. Some of us have learned to subject ourselves to physical, sexual, emotional, verbal, and spiritual abuse. That’s not courageous vulnerability. It’s called “learned helplessness,” and it’s something we can get help to unlearn.

Courageous vulnerability is learning to move from a pattern of self-protection to being more open with people who care about us. This doesn’t mean we will never experience problems in our relationships. Courageous vulnerability is about pushing past the unhealthy fears that are keeping us from being known and loved by others.

The first time I shared my anxiety with the people at my church was during a Sunday service. There were hundreds of people present. I knew sharing my story was another part of exposure. I told myself that some people would not understand what I was talking about. They would want to fix me or even judge me (and some did). But I also told myself there would be many others that would be grateful that I was courageously vulnerable, and my courageous words would make some of them feel less alone. And that’s exactly what happened.